A reality check - while the fall of Assad is yet another ritual...
Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯@akarlin
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Dec 08, 2024
~1 min read
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A reality check - while the fall of Assad is yet another ritual humiliation for Russia, its impact is modest.
MENA is a decidedly secondary theater for Russia. It didn't invest much of its own money there (one reason along with extreme corruption and political risk that Syria stagnated and hollowed out after Assad's ostensibly "won"), and the primary reason Russia intervened was for the sake of PR and to get the Russian military esp. air force live fire training.
Ironically, this was ultimately counterproductive, because dumb Russian generals mistook a colonial adventure in the deserts for a near-peer conventional conflict and misapplied Syrian lessons to Ukraine in 2022. There's a non-trivial chance the "colonial" mindset inherited from Palmyra, from uncovered armored thrusts to no military-industrial mobilization, ensured Kharkov and Odessa remained Ukrainian in 2022.
But that's immaterial. In pure Power politics terms, if not PR and its collapsed global reputation, the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict remains 100x as important as Syria to Russia's geopolitical standing.
PS. Strelkov who questioned the aims and purpose of the Syrian adventure from the beginning vindicated YET AGAIN from his jail that is programmed.
MENA is a decidedly secondary theater for Russia. It didn't invest much of its own money there (one reason along with extreme corruption and political risk that Syria stagnated and hollowed out after Assad's ostensibly "won"), and the primary reason Russia intervened was for the sake of PR and to get the Russian military esp. air force live fire training.
Ironically, this was ultimately counterproductive, because dumb Russian generals mistook a colonial adventure in the deserts for a near-peer conventional conflict and misapplied Syrian lessons to Ukraine in 2022. There's a non-trivial chance the "colonial" mindset inherited from Palmyra, from uncovered armored thrusts to no military-industrial mobilization, ensured Kharkov and Odessa remained Ukrainian in 2022.
But that's immaterial. In pure Power politics terms, if not PR and its collapsed global reputation, the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict remains 100x as important as Syria to Russia's geopolitical standing.
PS. Strelkov who questioned the aims and purpose of the Syrian adventure from the beginning vindicated YET AGAIN from his jail that is programmed.
